In The Lair Of The Dweller

: The Moon Pool

It is with marked hesitation that I begin this chapter, because in it

I must deal with an experience so contrary to every known law of

physics as to seem impossible. Until this time, barring, of course,

the mystery of the Dweller, I had encountered nothing that was not

susceptible of naturalistic explanation; nothing, in a word, outside

the domain of science itself; nothing that I would have felt hesitancy

in reciting o my colleagues of the International Association of

Science. Amazing, unfamiliar--advanced--as many of the phenomena were,

still they lay well within the limits of what we have mapped as the

possible; in regions, it is true, still virgin to the mind of man, but

toward which that mind is steadily advancing.



But this--well, I confess that I have a theory that is naturalistic;

but so abstruse, so difficult to make clear within the short confines

of the space I have to give it, so dependent upon conceptions that

even the highest-trained scientific brains find difficult to grasp,

that I despair.



I can only say that the thing occurred; that it took place in

precisely the manner I am about to narrate, and that I experienced it.



Yet, in justice to myself, I must open up some paths of preliminary

approach toward the heart of the perplexity. And the first path is the

realization that our world whatever it is, is certainly not the

world as we see it! Regarding this I shall refer to a discourse upon

"Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity," by the distinguished

English physicist, Dr. A. S. Eddington, which I had the pleasure of

hearing him deliver before the Royal Institution.[1]



I realize, of course, that it is not true logic to argue--"The world

is not as we think it is--therefore everything we think impossible is

possible in it." Even if it be different, it is governed by law. The

truly impossible is that which is outside law, and as nothing can be

outside law, the impossible cannot exist.



The crux of the matter then becomes our determination whether what we

think is impossible may or may not be possible under laws still beyond

our knowledge.



I hope that you will pardon me for this somewhat academic digression,

but I felt it was necessary, and it has, at least, put me more at

ease. And now to resume.



We had watched, Larry and I, the frog-men throw the bodies of Yolara's

assassins into the crimson waters. As vultures swoop down upon the

dying, there came sailing swiftly to where the dead men floated,

dozens of the luminous globes. Their slender, varicoloured tentacles

whipped out; the giant iridescent bubbles climbed over the cadavers.

And as they touched them there was the swift dissolution, the melting

away into putrescence of flesh and bone that I had witnessed when the

dart touched fruit that time I had saved Rador--and upon this the

Medusae gorged; pulsing lambently; their wondrous colours shifting,

changing, glowing stronger; elfin moons now indeed, but satellites

whose glimmering beauty was fed by death; alembics of enchantment

whose glorious hues were sucked from horror.



Sick, I turned away--O'Keefe as pale as I; passed back into the

corridor that had opened on the ledge from which we had watched; met

Lakla hurrying toward us. Before she could speak there throbbed

faintly about us a vast sighing. It grew into a murmur, a whispering,

shook us--then passing like a presence, died away in far distance.



"The Portal has opened," said the handmaiden. A fainter sighing, like

an echo of the other, mourned about us. "Yolara is gone," she said,

"the Portal is closed. Now must we hasten--for the Three have

commanded that you, Goodwin, and Larry and I tread that strange road

of which I have spoken, and which Olaf may not take lest his heart

break--and we must return ere he and Rador cross the bridge."



Her hand sought Larry's.



"Come!" said Lakla, and we walked on; down and down through hall after

hall, flight upon flight of stairways. Deep, deep indeed, we must be

beneath the domed castle--Lakla paused before a curved, smooth breast

of the crimson stone rounding gently into the passage. She pressed its

side; it revolved; we entered; it closed behind us.



The room, the--hollow--in which we stood was faceted like a diamond;

and like a cut brilliant its sides glistened--though dully. Its shape

was a deep oval, and our path dropped down to a circular polished

base, roughly two yards in diameter. Glancing behind me I saw that in

the closing of the entrance there had been left no trace of it save

the steps that led from where that entrance had been--and as I looked

these steps turned, leaving us isolated upon the circle, only the

faceted walls about us--and in each of the gleaming faces the three of

us reflected--dimly. It was as though we were within a diamond egg

whose graven angles had been turned inward.



But the oval was not perfect; at my right a screen cut it--a screen

that gleamed with fugitive, fleeting luminescences--stretching from

the side of our standing place up to the tip of the chamber; slightly

convex and crisscrossed by millions of fine lines like those upon a

spectroscopic plate, but with this difference--that within each line I

sensed the presence of multitudes of finer lines, dwindling into

infinitude, ultramicroscopic, traced by some instrument compared to

whose delicacy our finest tool would be as a crowbar to the needle of

a micrometer.



A foot or two from it stood something like the standee of a compass,

bearing, like it a cradled dial under whose crystal ran concentric

rings of prisoned, lambent vapours, faintly blue. From the edge of the

dial jutted a little shelf of crystal, a keyboard, in which were cut

eight small cups.



Within these cups the handmaiden placed her tapering fingers. She

gazed down upon the disk; pressed a digit--and the screen behind us

slipped noiselessly into another angle.



"Put your arm around my waist, Larry, darlin', and stand close," she

murmured. "You, Goodwin, place your arm over my shoulder."



Wondering, I did as she bade; she pressed other fingers upon the

shelf's indentations--three of the rings of vapour spun into intense

light, raced around each other; from the screen behind us grew a

radiance that held within itself all spectrums--not only those seen,

but those unseen by man's eyes. It waxed brilliant and ever more

brilliant, all suffusing, passing through me as day streams through a

window pane!



The enclosing facets burst into a blaze of coruscations, and in each

sparkling panel I saw our images, shaken and torn like pennants in a

whirlwind. I turned to look--was stopped by the handmaiden's swift

command: "Turn not--on your life!"



The radiance behind me grew; was a rushing tempest of light in which I

was but the shadow of a shadow. I heard, but not with my ears--nay with

mind itself--a vast roaring; an ordered tumult of sound that came

hurling from the outposts of space; approaching--rushing--hurricane

out of the heart of the cosmos--closer, closer. It wrapped itself

about us with unearthly mighty arms.



And brilliant, ever more brilliant, streamed the radiance through us.



The faceted walls dimmed; in front of me they melted, diaphanously,

like a gelatinous wall in a blast of flame; through their vanishing,

under the torrent of driving light, the unthinkable, impalpable

tornado, I began to move, slowly--then ever more swiftly!



Still the roaring grew; the radiance streamed--ever faster we went.

Cutting down through the length, the extension of me, dropped a wall

of rock, foreshortened, clenched close; I caught a glimpse of the

elfin gardens; they whirled, contracted, into a thin--slice--of colour

that was a part of me; another wall of rock shrinking into a thin

wedge through which I flew, and that at once took its place within me

like a card slipped beside those others!



Flashing around me, and from Lakla and O'Keefe, were nimbuses of

flickering scarlet flames. And always the steady hurling

forward--appallingly mechanical.



Another barrier of rock--a gleam of white waters incorporating

themselves into my--drawing out--even as were the flowered moss lands,

the slicing, rocky walls--still another rampart of cliff, dwindling

instantly into the vertical plane of those others. Our flight checked;

we seemed to hover within, then to sway onward--slowly, cautiously.



A mist danced ahead of me--a mist that grew steadily thinner. We

stopped, wavered--the mist cleared.



I looked out into translucent, green distances; shot with swift

prismatic gleamings; waves and pulsings of luminosity like midday sun

glow through green, tropic waters: dancing, scintillating veils of

sparkling atoms that flew, hither and yon, through depths of nebulous

splendour!



And Lakla and Larry and I were, I saw, like shadow shapes upon a

smooth breast of stone twenty feet or more above the surface of this

place--a surface spangled with tiny white blossoms gleaming wanly

through creeping veils of phosphorescence like smoke of moon fire. We

were shadows--and yet we had substance; we were incorporated with, a

part of, the rock--and yet we were living flesh and blood; we

stretched--nor will I qualify this--we stretched through mile upon

mile of space that weirdly enough gave at one and the same time an

absolute certainty of immense horizontal lengths and a vertical

concentration that contained nothing of length, nothing of space

whatever; we stood there upon the face of the stone--and still we

were here within the faceted oval before the screen of radiance!



"Steady!" It was Lakla's voice--and not beside me there, but at my ear

close before the screen. "Steady, Goodwin! And--see!"



The sparkling haze cleared. Enormous reaches stretched before me.

Shimmering up through them, and as though growing in some medium

thicker than air, was mass upon mass of verdure--fruiting trees and

trees laden with pale blossoms, arbours and bowers of pallid blooms,

like that sea fruit of oblivion--grapes of Lethe--that cling to the

tide-swept walls of the caverns of the Hebrides.



Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a

horde--great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast

as the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs--men and

women and children--clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked;

slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and

yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks

fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and

shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and

Vikings centuries beyond their lives: scores of the black-haired

Murians; white faces of our own Westerners--men and women and

children--drifting, eddying--each stamped with that mingled horror and

rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined, marked by God

and devil in embrace--the seal of the Shining One--the dead-alive; the

lost ones!



The loot of the Dweller!



Soul-sick, I gazed. They lifted to us visages of dread; they swept

down toward us, glaring upward--a bank against which other and still

other waves of faces rolled, were checked, paused; until as far as I

could see, like billows piled upon an ever-growing barrier, they

stretched beneath us--staring--staring!



Now there was a movement--far, far away; a concentrating of the

lambency; the dead-alive swayed, oscillated, separated--forming a long

lane against whose outskirts they crowded with avid, hungry

insistence.



First only a luminous cloud, then a whirling pillar of splendours

through the lane came--the Shining One. As it passed, the dead-alive

swirled in its wake like leaves behind a whirlwind, eddying, twisting;

and as the Dweller raced by them, brushing them with its spirallings

and tentacles, they shone forth with unearthly, awesome

gleamings--like vessels of alabaster in which wicks flare suddenly.

And when it had passed they closed behind it, staring up at us once

more.



The Dweller paused beneath us.



Out of the drifting ruck swam the body of Throckmartin! Throckmartin,

my friend, to find whom I had gone to the pallid moon door; my friend

whose call I had so laggardly followed. On his face was the Dweller's

dreadful stamp; the lips were bloodless; the eyes were wide, lucent,

something like pale, phosphorescence gleaming within them--and

soulless.



He stared straight up at me, unwinking, unrecognizing. Pressing

against his side was a woman, young and gentle, and lovely--lovely

even through the mask that lay upon her face. And her wide eyes, like

Throckmartin's, glowed with the lurking, unholy fires. She pressed

against him closely; though the hordes kept up the faint churning,

these two kept ever together, as though bound by unseen fetters.



And I knew the girl for Edith, his wife, who in vain effort to save

him had cast herself into the Dweller's embrace!



"Throckmartin!" I cried. "Throckmartin! I'm here!"



Did he hear? I know now, of course, he could not.



But then I waited--hope striving to break through the nightmare hands

that gripped my heart.



Their wide eyes never left me. There was another movement about them,

others pushed past them; they drifted back, swaying, eddying--and

still staring were lost in the awful throng.



Vainly I strained my gaze to find them again, to force some sign of

recognition, some awakening of the clean life we know. But they were

gone. Try as I would I could not see them--nor Stanton and the

northern woman named Thora who had been the first of that tragic party

to be taken by the Dweller.



"Throckmartin!" I cried again, despairingly. My tears blinded me.



I felt Lakla's light touch.



"Steady," she commanded, pitifully. "Steady, Goodwin. You cannot help

them--now! Steady and--watch!"



Below us the Shining One had paused--spiralling, swirling, vibrant

with all its transcendent, devilish beauty; had paused and was

contemplating us. Now I could see clearly that nucleus, that core shot

through with flashing veins of radiance, that ever-shifting shape of

glory through the shroudings of shimmering, misty plumes, throbbing



lacy opalescences, vaporous spirallings of prismatic phantom fires.

Steady over it hung the seven little moons of amethyst, of saffron, of

emerald and azure and silver, of rose of life and moon white. They

poised themselves like a diadem--calm, serene, immobile--and down

from them into the Dweller, piercing plumes and swirls and spirals,

ran countless tiny strands, radiations, finer than the finest spun

thread of spider's web, gleaming filaments through which seemed to

run--power--from the seven globes; like--yes, that was it--miniatures

of the seven torrents of moon flame that poured through the

septichromatic, high crystals in the Moon Pool's chamber roof.



Swam out of the coruscating haze the--face!



Both of man and of woman it was--like some ancient, androgynous deity

of Etruscan fanes long dust, and yet neither woman nor man; human and

unhuman, seraphic and sinister, benign and malefic--and still no more

of these four than is flame, which is beautiful whether it warms or

devours, or wind whether it feathers the trees or shatters them, or

the wave which is wondrous whether it caresses or kills.



Subtly, undefinably it was of our world and of one not ours. Its

lineaments flowed from another sphere, took fleeting familiar

form--and as swiftly withdrew whence they had come; something

amorphous, unearthly--as of unknown unheeding, unseen gods rushing

through the depths of star-hung space; and still of our own earth,

with the very soul of earth peering out from it, caught within it--and

in some--unholy--way debased.



It had eyes--eyes that were now only shadows darkening within its

luminosity like veils falling, and falling, opening windows into the

unknowable; deepening into softly glowing blue pools, blue as the Moon

Pool itself; then flashing out, and this only when the--face--bore its

most human resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of

little moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of peep-holes

into a world untrodden, alien, perilous to man!



"Steady!" came Lakla's voice, her body leaned against mine.



I gripped myself, my brain steadied, I looked again. And I saw that

of body, at least body as we know it, the Shining One had

none--nothing but the throbbing, pulsing core streaked with lightning

veins of rainbows; and around this, never still, sheathing it, the

swirling, glorious veilings of its hell and heaven born radiance.



So the Dweller stood--and gazed.



Then up toward us swept a reaching, questing spiral!



Under my hand Lakla's shoulder quivered; dead-alive and their master

vanished--I danced, flickered, within the rock; felt a swift sense of

shrinking, of withdrawal; slice upon slice the carded walls of stone,

of silvery waters, of elfin gardens slipped from me as cards are

withdrawn from a pack, one by one--slipped, wheeled, flattened, and

lengthened out as I passed through them and they passed from me.



Gasping, shaken, weak, I stood within the faceted oval chamber; arm

still about the handmaiden's white shoulder; Larry's hand still

clutching her girdle.



The roaring, impalpable gale from the cosmos was retreating to the

outposts of space--was still; the intense, streaming, flooding

radiance lessened--died.



"Now have you beheld," said Lakla, "and well you trod the road. And

now shall you hear, even as the Silent Ones have commanded, what the

Shining One is--and how it came to be."



The steps flashed back; the doorway into the chamber opened.



Larry as silent as I--we followed her through it.





[1] Reprinted in full in Nature, in which those sufficiently interested

may peruse it.--W. T. G.